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The Struggle for Auto Safety offers a nuanced lawyers' perspective (Jerry Mashaw is a professor of law at Yale; David Harfst is a practicing attorney) on the history of national automobile safety regulation from its inception in 1966 through the middle 1980s. The result is an illuminating history of the transformation of a public policy illustrating the thesis that general legal culture plays an important and independent role in the development of public policies.
In 1966, Congress adopted the National Highway and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. The act created the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and authorized it to use broad rule-making power to impose performance-oriented, technology-forcing safety rules on the industry. The 1966 change was radical: from state and industry definition of safety to national control, from limited after-the-fact review of design decisions based on great deference to the industry to technology-forcing based on publicly funded research. Of particular interest is chapter 3's account of the political forces that came together to make adoption of this legislation uncontroversial.
Yet within a decade NHTSA largely abandoned the effort to regulate safety technology by rule. Indeed, most of the rules adopted imposed specific standards based on existing technology rather than performance goals to be satisfied with new technology (chapters P7). NHTSA turned, instead, to its...